8 weeks down!

8 weeks in and things are finally starting to feel normal :)

My students are loving our read aloud of the Lightning Thief and can't wait to figure out who Percy's dad is.  The ones that have seen the movie or read the novel are doing a great job of keeping quiet to not ruin it for the rest of them :)

We analyzed the development of Percy over the first few chapters of The Lightning Thief:

I modeled the first chapter and students worked in groups of 2 or 3 to re-read, looking for specific details about the main character's thoughts, actions and motivations.

We ran out of room in the classroom and since I didn't want to disrupt the learning of the other classrooms, we went outside to share.

Of course, my principal happened to walk by when she was observing PE and monitoring playground duty.  Luckily the student she asked about our learning was able to fully articulate that we worked in small groups to re-read, looking for evidence and recording our thinking on anchor charts.  Granted, he was off task a few moments later but at least he could focus for that short period of time :)

We are finishing up our first set of novels, so my students have posted their charts of our interesting words on our word wall:

Each time they met with me, they shared the words they found in their reading.  I recorded their answers and changed colors each time so they could easily see which words were new.

They also posted their logs for keeping track of characters:

For the Series of Unfortunate Events, it will be interesting to watch these characters develop over the next twelve books.  AM and PM also compared and contrasted the charts that they made and had some great discussions about the novel.

I also posted their writing ideas chart on our anchor chart about writing genres:

On Fridays, we do our formative assessment on our weekly phonics skill.

My students track their own progress:

We glued trackers inside the front cover of their word study notebooks.  On one side is the skill we're working on and on the other is where they record their score as well as if they're emerging, approaching, meeting or exceeding on that skill.

Happy Friday! 

(Unfortunately, this weekend is devoted to grading and preparing for parent-teacher conferences, so it's a good thing next week is only 2 days with one of those days being a field trip!  We plan well!)